


rot and remain

by hotmess_ex_press



Category: BLACKPINK (Band)
Genre: Dependency, F/F, Unhealthy Relationships, Witchcraft, Zombies, this is messyy but i really wanted to get something spooky out for my girls, tw for slight body horror!
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-27
Updated: 2020-10-27
Packaged: 2021-03-08 21:34:30
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,249
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27223570
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/hotmess_ex_press/pseuds/hotmess_ex_press
Summary: In its cavernous home, Lisa's heart skips into greater harmony, butterfly-quickened and echoing through the channels of her body. Oh, Jisoo iswarm, and Jisoo is alive and kisses like a blooming plum-black bruise, and Lisa drinks into her mouth as if life was something tangible and divine, the singed edge of Jisoo's spit.Veins roaring, Lisa feels her body blossom with renaissance under the heat of Jisoo's nightshade touch. Skin cajoled minutely closer to warmth, she is almost-human. Boiling, tumbling, blood concentrate--that's what love is,mustbe what love is.
Relationships: Kim Jisoo/Lalisa Manoban | Lisa
Comments: 2
Kudos: 12





	rot and remain

**Author's Note:**

> a [playlist](https://open.spotify.com/playlist/3psQDkbXu8o6RB8mddpr4q), if that's your thing!

Lisa enters the graveyard with a bloodred rose bloomed between her bone-white palms like a handful of cuts, and leaves with Jisoo's arms a chain and anchor around her waist, her legs iron-stiff with death that she just can't shake off.

"That's a side effect of being recently undead," Jisoo states, and Lisa can't wring a centimeter, a fold, a lick of merciful humor from her unyielding tone. There's a milky mug of mint tea shoved between her prone fingers, and she registers the burn but not the heat. It's the prickling numbness of too many uncovered hours in the snow, frostbite inverted, an ice that doesn't writhe in through the pores, but rather slicks up the veins from the inside, a bitter hard freeze that fractals out from her bones.

Jisoo ravels a night-thick blanket around her shoulders, kneels at her feet. The undersides of her nails are coated in rich earth. Bound to Jisoo's kitchen chair by braids of rigid apathy, all Lisa can do is tip her head, gaze dripping down her nose to settle on Jisoo. She hears the creak as her head hinges forward, ripping along her vertebrae. Jisoo's hands circle her thighs, kneading her arteries with stern warmth. Beneath her death-damp skin, Lisa can feel her viscous blood, sluggishly lapping at the walls of her veins.

She looks translucent, glowing like stretched distended plastic under the quivering, sick green-yellow light of the kitchen, against the fluorescent scarlet of the dress her body was looped and knotted into. She's certain her lipstick is a matching color.

With curled fingers she scrapes at the gloss on her mouth. It washes over her lips, her chin and cheeks and teeth and hand, in ropes of glopping ruby. Like strings of hot, half-dissolved blood. It's the warmest thing she's felt against her stony skin since she died.

"I'm tired," she says. Jisoo nods and pries Lisa's alabaster grip from the undrunk cup.

"Let's get you to bed," Jisoo replies, and Lisa lets shutter her eyes, sinks away from the throb of artificial midnight light in her skull.

Lisa could feel the illness, circling around her lungs like a smoke-spined viper, cranked back low and lethal into a coiled spring and straining to lunge forward, snare her lungs in a blackened vice. She could feel it slither around and around her chest, pulling in tighter every night, tendrils of it licking into her veins and letting them crumble pillow-soft and airless in their wake.

Lisa could feel it and she tried to coax it out with silver-shined acrylic claws but all she could gouge away was ribbons of skin, garden snakes of winding red left behind for the viper to swallow down as well. She stood in front of the mirror, bare from guts through gullet, in the half-light of the moon and leeching streetlights, and tore at her chest but once it was cleared of skin the serpent only burrowed closer and she already looked like a skeleton in that eerie moon-spotlight, eyes stuck through empty sockets and gaping cheeks, yawning ribs.

 _I can't die, I can't die, I can't_ , she would chant without sound in the ink-dark smother of night, oppressive with shrieking wind and decay. Disease, everywhere, caught in the corners of her shrinking room and dancing around her throttling bed like vultures, like reapers, like restless, taunting fate.

"I can't die," she murmured with desert-cracked lips in the broad sweep of daylight, but her hair was losing its shine and flow, she was fumbling around the buttons of her sweater with fingers like icicle tips.

 _I can't die_ , she prayed to every god she could think of, but not even the moon with her gentle kiss and long-burning embrace has time for pretty, dying, rotting things.

And so she turned away from the shoulders of the gods, the stiff back of destiny, and towards the far corner of the deep lecture hall, where a gossamer pair of eyes had been angled her way the whole time.

Kim Jisoo: pretty as a painting from far away, but that was as close as Lisa ever got. Cobwebs and wicked glistening secrets and a snarl of furious rumors tangled between her hands, tantalizing the longer Lisa looked.

And Jisoo was always gazing back, ancient eyes like they were plucked right from a fallen angel's bowed skull and poured into hers. Lips a brittle line like she was a vulture, a reaper, Lisa's restless, taunting fate. Waiting for Lisa's too casual, too loping amble over to her seat in the shadowed bowels of the hall. Unblinking, always unblinking.

"I'm going to die," Lisa stated, eyes leveled to the wall behind Jisoo and chin jutting houndlike. Shaking hands poised in iron fists as they gripped the straps of her bag. "Can you bring me back?"

Jisoo had a blank sheet of paper and blade-sharpened pencil in front of her, and didn't glance from Lisa's warbling face as she folded both into her worn satchel. Up close, the cloud of her distilled lilac perfume choked with an acrid undercurrent, horehound and juniper berries and something clotted, something carnal. Scarlet tattoos slashed across her fingers, spattered over her magnolia skin where the jagged rips in her knit sweater parted. Emotionless, unbending marks: receipts in flesh and endless scar, a list carved in tongues Lisa shied away from, dragged from Jisoo's veins to languish between sheets of skin forever.

Her eyes were pitch but not the black of stars, not the black of the whirling ocean on a windy night. They were the black of infinity, gobbling light and stilling the tilt of time.

Lisa didn't linger on them, in fear of being caught and reeled in, to sink into those ravenous pools of roiling eternity evermore.

Jisoo's lips stretched, spring-pink and jarring. A single blink of mercy. "I can."

Lisa's swallow caught in her throat, quivering like its namesake bird. "And... will you?"

"It won't be the same." Jisoo's hair made up for her eyes in scintillating moonlight, rippling with a thousand strands of fluid silver as she tilted her head. Lisa's clenched knuckles screamed white and high.

"What's the catch?"

Her elusive expression didn't flicker, but one crimson-etched hand raised to gently knock against her chest, between lungs. "Your soul will belong to me."

Lisa's eyes drooped and she was weak, weightless, like one breath of billowed wind would peel her ribs up from her body, toss them on the waltz of rolling air. "I need to live. I need to live."

"Alright," Jisoo's voice softer, satin-pacifying. She tipped a gracious hand Lisa's way. "It's a deal."

Her mouth twisted in quiet pain when Lisa touched her palm, more capillaries crunching into place beneath that thin layer of moonglow skin. Lisa imagined it, the sanguine promise of Lisa's rebirth traced across her body, and shivered.

That was three months ago, when autumn's unflinching red warmth skimmed the wind and Lisa's tarnished heart was frolicking its last.

"How long was I dead?" Lisa asks. Her chair is perpendicular to the wide windows, the floor speckled with watery morning sunlight. "I didn't know that you'd really bring me back."

"Not two weeks." Jisoo smiles strange and sweet and eerie. "I never break a deal."

Lisa stands and sways. Jisoo watches her with carefully close eyes, but doesn't reach out. Lisa takes small shuffling steps, presses her fingertips fast to the frost-shattered window panes. She's greedy for movement but not even the plucked-clean tree branches stir in a wind, and everything is burning with a terrible chill. A fire scrabbles young and sputtering at the brick fireplace, stoked and caressed by freezing nudges of sunshine.

"It's January," she muses, fingertips tripping along the shimmering glass. She feels doll-like, fingers curved in awkward uniform. "When can I go back to classes?"

She had been stumbling down halls and towards death during exams. If she retakes them, she could graduate on time, she could get her degree, wrapped tight in red ribbon and dreams.

The brush at the hollow of her back doesn't register until it has slid up to graze her shoulder, Jisoo's scent prickling her nose. Bitter, bitter, sweet. Lisa clings to it like it's sanity, like it's relief, threads of perfume a tether to her senses.

"Once you feel better," Jisoo says, and eases Lisa's head into the dip of her neck, where her fragrance scorches the sharpest. She drops kisses of air between Lisa's fingers, unraveling them from each other. "Soon, baby."

Lisa doesn't realize she's in love with Jisoo until Jisoo kisses her, lids slipped over her slick lightless gaze and each tooth a fine blade of pearl. Jisoo lays her sugar like a bruise: swirling and plum-black and stinging so sweet in all the right places. Shallow here and twisting incessantly there, melting away when Lisa tries to press closer, closer yet. She kisses like magic, like the corpses of a hundred glittering stars, like shadows coagulated.

Her fingertips are wells, Lisa's blood blooming to the surface where they etch.

In its cavernous home, Lisa's heart skips into greater harmony, butterfly-quickened and echoing through the channels of her body. Oh, Jisoo is _warm_ , and Jisoo is alive, and Lisa drinks into her mouth as if life was something tangible and divine, the singed edge of Jisoo's spit.

Veins roaring, Lisa feels her body blossom with renaissance under the heat of Jisoo's nightshade touch. Skin cajoled minutely closer to warmth, she is almost-human. Boiling, tumbling, blood concentrate--that's what love is, _must_ be what love is.

Lisa burns the scarlet dress she was buried in under the sloppy sprawl of the full moon, the pyre that her last wishes begged away from. If her family knew her at all, they should have known she hates that damn, garish dress.

Her skin is the sheen of copper when held to the firelight. Lisa crouches so close that she can feel flame scrape beneath her nails, and rubs the spidersilk ashes over her arms, embers sizzling beneath her skin. Jisoo, Jisoo _knows_ her. From lip to soul.

Lisa tears the fluttering gauze veil away from the vanity; it crashes like a spout of violet water against the wall. The mirror peers naked and searching into the room, caressing each dried flower strewn across the floor, cradling the gold-and-leather spines of the tomes leaning on Jisoo's scuffed quartz-draped bookcase, guzzling down the ebbing bronze light of the room. Lisa drags her fingers along the runes and dips inlaid in the steel frame. It's been long, so long since she snagged across the rippling surface of a mirror, since she faced the brewing storm within.

She has never seen her undead face, only imagined it, filled in the gaps eroded away in dark, dusty windows. She closes her eyes as she sinks onto the rosebud-pouf chair.

Her reflection does not burst before her, eyelids a feathery dam breaking between her and enlightenment. It does not swarm her, swallow her whole in the deja-vu remembrance of it all. No, her reflection is contorting, quiet dread, probing chilly and unrelenting into her still chest.

Her skin is ashen, photograph-grey, dust beneath her snakeskin fingertips. The pink of her eyes is too raw, too red, twin gashes opening into vivid crimson beneath her eyes.

She leans forward, grabs her face. Beneath her hands, her skin kneads like rubber. She's so close the glass should have fogged over in cloudcover relief below her breath, but it's stark, unrelenting, brutal and true. Thawed flesh wrinkles under her panic-frayed fingertips but she can't feel it, every nerve of her face blunt and tingling with a leeching numbness.

She thrusts the chair back, wrenching the drawers of the vanity so hard they knock frantic against their wooden slots.

Useless fingers, still poised like a mannequin's fanciful wave. She flings them through the drawers, clanking vials and plastic-tipped tubes scudding to the floor, until her cupped hands close around a bottle of Jisoo's ivory-concentrate foundation. Lisa rips the lid away with furious teeth and fumbles the sleek bottle; it clatters onto the vanity and belches a pool of noxious eggshell slime.

Lisa scrapes her bent fingers through the expanding waste, slapping them against her cheeks. Dense plaster drips down to her neck, warm and so bright in comparison to that lifeless skin, deadened visage she can't recognize as her own. It streaks across her face in viscous, separating currents as she scrubs it across the decaying curves of her grimace, thick globs of liquid skin.

There is a snarl of dull black quivering atop her head, cut through with tangled threads. She snatches a brush from Jisoo's drawer and lodges it into her hair at the thorny roots, yanking it down the coal-monotonous strands. Foundation smears through her hair as she strains the brush through.

As it finally wrests from the dry, splitting ends, a handful of crooked strands heaves free, cements to the foundation-muddy hollows of Lisa's palms.

Lisa lets out an ugly rocking sob and her hair is a crown peeling away to sketch wretched epaulets across her shoulders and opaque foundation slurps a grotesquely rigid river down her throat, and Jisoo is leaning in the doorway like she's been there the whole time, watching, watching passive and detached, always, _watching_.

"What have you done to me?" Lisa cries, shaky as a wheel-carved puddle, wincing away from the mess splattered in the mirror.

As a mother would placate a warbling child, Jisoo exhales gentle but laced with a predatory impatience. "Nothing you didn't ask for."

"I wanted to live, I wanted to _live_ ," Lisa beseeches, brandishing a handful of wilted hair like a mayday bouquet in Jisoo's direction. Her voice rises into a frenzied tremble. "Not like this!"

Her fingers unfurl, snapping back into harsh formation. A clump of hair flutters to the floor, the rest still glued around her palm. Her voice dwindles once again, fracturing over the stiff lump in her throat.

"Never like this."

Jisoo picks her way across the room, footsteps pond-soft. The violet tulle flutters to mask the mirror again, Lisa's body vanishing to nothing more than flickering shadow, a blurring silhouette.

"I was so beautiful," Lisa whispers, head drooping down to sag between her hands. Jisoo brushes her cheek, fingertips sliding against the slippery rind of sloshed alabaster.

"You still are," Jisoo assuages, silken.

Lisa's fingers curl, scalp collapsing where her nails delve. "Say it again. Tell me again."

"This is what you wanted," Jisoo reminds, instead of letting slip the tender nothings Lisa is starving for. She plucks a single strand of needle-rough hair from Lisa's shoulder, flicking it to the floor. "To live."

Lisa pries her fingers in two, space enough to stare at the shrouded mirror. Eyes rimmed in jarring garnet peer back at her, ghoulish even through the rustling curtain.

She feels half-past dead.

Lights off and safely hidden beneath the snowdrift duvet, Lisa twists into Jisoo and kisses her open-mouthed and open-eyed, sifting through Jisoo for just a fleck, a mottled shadow of life. She swirls up and down the moonlit plane of Jisoo's back, catching on each knob of her spine.

Jisoo knocks a starsoft, bountiful leg between Lisa's, but their knees bump, unwieldy. She massages pleasure into the endless divot of Lisa's inner thighs but Lisa is bloodless, brain cataloging the lust and scorch but skin of stone, hosting Jisoo's sonorous, swooping touch thanklessly.

After too many empty minutes, Jisoo sighs, turns away. Her delicate breath lulls into courteous sleep so quickly Lisa's eyes singe with fluttering shame and simmering resentment and bruised grief.

She is a mermaid from the waist down, cold and clammy and loveless.

Spring tugs at the edges of the horizon but Lisa spirals colder and colder, clinging to Jisoo's footsteps lest her hands harden with twisting, serpentine pain.

She would have been graduating now. Should have been.

Instead, she's the shadow splashing across the walls behind Jisoo, so quivering cold when they're a room apart that she thinks she'll crumple paperlike at the slightest scrape of movement, spine gnarled with sore, skittering chill. Food is ash curling down her throat.

"You can't have done it right," she pleads, forever drowning in her quest to wring comfort from Jisoo's stone-flat, universe-deep gaze. "Something must have gone wrong."

She dances nearer to death's crisp blade the further she tendrils and slumps away from Jisoo. Those blooming berrysweet berrybitter lips on her are the only thing that pull at her blood, keep her from freezing over, ice and stained bird-light bone.

Wordlessly, Jisoo glides down the buttons of her shirt, pale hands lucid under beaming sunlight where Lisa's look liquid, look sick and scoured smoke-thin.

A candied flourish between lungs, veins deflected to pulse carmine just beneath her skin. Lisa's soul, tucked soft and silent and rotting between flesh and flesh.

Lisa trips forward, yanked on leaden feet. One wooden hand lands heavy on Jisoo's rolling chest, pushing into Jisoo like her essence will seep back in through her knuckles, swill new blood through her low-tide arteries and heat her from dissolving marrow to spoiling lungs.

She wants to carve it out from Jisoo's body, crush it down her cracking throat and be flooded back to booming, teeming _life_.

Her hand tumbles to her side, a distorted pendulum folded into the scoop of her shoulder. She shivers.

Jisoo crowds into her bones like she already rules the gaps between, and Lisa shrinks doll-docile in her arms.

When she slices recklessly the pad of her finger on the crescent-moon edge of a kitchen knife, blood rises in clots, beading pungent and fetid.

"Jisoo," she whispers, but her words splinter before they can touch her paperdry tongue.

Her hand closes around the cautious blaze of a cheerful candle wick and dissolves into a flare of bone-white screaming flame. She's sculpted of flash paper and the clods of decomposing pearl-blood don't jostle down her veins to smother the fire fast enough. Her skin hisses as it disappears beneath the mercy of bubbling water.

She doesn't feel the burn, the blister until Jisoo grazes her shoulder and she nearly snaps like a switchblade, curving in two places at the ripe weight of clashing pain.

"Jisoo," she tries to whisper, but her insides are gravel and speaking is dragging a spidery shred of silk from toe to tongue, hoping any airy threads of it break free to creak from her ground-juniper lips.

The first full moon of spring climbs into the sky nickel-bright and cruel. Lisa's fingers are stubs of lead to encase her hands.

"Jisoo, I'm scared," she rasps from her velvet-winged chair. Jisoo is wearing a gown of blue-black and she is a bruise, a supernova of the skin. She swirls like satin sand and ambrosial time to cup Lisa's face, like Lisa is a mimicry of the full moon in her petal-smooth hands.

Lisa feels the rip and rupture of tendons as she gazes up at mercurial Jisoo, at her eyes that echo, the voids that span eternities. Her meretricious beauty.

"Dance with me," Jisoo breathes. Lisa's soul a slash down the fog-kissed cleave of her ribs. She slithers towards the moon-drenched rifts between kitchen tiles, celestial stagelights sloshed almost carelessly, far too lovely, across the room. Never mentioning the sag and crumble of flesh and vein beneath her sweet cyanide fingertips as she clasps Lisa's wrist, drags her in.

Love devours Lisa from the inside out.

**Author's Note:**

> thank you for reading, comments and kudos are love <3


End file.
